Denmark - Days 2-3 - BRICS retreat

I woke up at the guesthouse, had breakfast, packed up and started towards the Computer Science department. It was a nice 2 km walk, taking roughly 20 minutes with a 20 kg backpack and another 5 kg bag in one of my hands. So needless to say that on arriving inside the building, I found the first corner in which I would not get in anyones way and just set my belongings down there.

That corner was 2 meters from the front door. I saw quite a few people enter and leave, most of them not exactly sure what to think of me. The feeling was mutual, however, as I knew noone by face. So I decided to look up Ivan (the professor I am visiting) on the internet and see how he looked like. As the picture was loading, a short and slim grey-bearded man passed me... and needless to say that as I turned back to the screen, I saw his photo. Embarassing. Anyways, at some point a bus arrived and then two people went out to meet it. When they came back, I asked whether that was the bus to the BRICS retreat and, on hearing that it was, introduced myself.

Before the bus took off, I had introduced myself to about 6 people, prof. Ivan Damgard being one of them. Despite this, noone sat next to me on the bus.. so I just took out a book and read during most of the bus drive.

On arrival, however, I reverted back to the very social person that I normally am and tried to slip into a conversation with a few people.. which succeeded on a few occasions. I realized that the retreat was not only for the Crypto group and that most of the people there were PhD students (about 30 of them, and there are supposedly 65 in total). The groups were pretty similar to those in Tartu - Crypto, Bioinformatics, Programming languages and OOP (Software engineering). There were a few additional groups however - Human Computer Interaction and Algorithmic Game Theory.

The first thing in the official agenda was something called "One-minute madness" where everyone was supposed to tell the others what they were doing, and was given just a minute to do so. That gave me a rather nice overview of what people were up to and who was in what group. I was sitting in the back, on top of the table in a half-lotus position. To my best estimate, the Crypto group was twice the size of all others, having 8 PhD students. It also seemed that none of them had been notified that I was coming. I found that out when they approached me en masse after the madness session, introduced themselves and welcomed me to the group.

We then had lunch and after that were given about an hour of free time. The retreat was held in a small Loony-Toons themed guesthouse that had a swimming pool, minigolf course, real golf course, artificial ski slope and a gym with bagminton nets and table tennis tables. Somewhat eclectic but otherwise really nice. After jumping a bit on the trampoline outside, I decided it would be fun to go swimming. So I did. And so it was.

The day continued with a session on Teaching and TA-ing. We were divided into groups and told to prepare a 30 minute long TA session on recursion. An organisational note is in order here - in here, PhD studies are much better structured than in Estonia. Each semester, each student is required to TA at least one course, which means he will have to give the exercise sessions for some course, or do some other teaching-related work. Also, they get paid 20 000 DKK a month and take their studies as a full-time job. It is supposedly very rare for people to finish either earlier or later than 4 years.

However - they do not have any courses on teaching - neither in the masters (as Tartu students do) nor in the PhD curriculum. So the TA session was an attempt to remedy that. After the practical exercise, the lecturer told us about student-oriented teaching methods and then gave us a more specific assignment where we should take these principles into account.

The next item in the itinerary was BRICS challenge - a team-building exercise that is supposedly different from year to year. This time, we were given a bag full of stuff and were asked to build two things - something that could weigh items from 50 to 200 grams and something that could throw an object as far as possible.

The bag contained - wooden sticks, elastic bands, a roll of string, a glue gun with 3 sticks, a small rubber ball, scissors, pen, paper, two carpet cutters and 4 bags of candy (58 g each) .

Well, for weighing, all teams settled on a scale and used the candy to calibrate. As for the catapult, we considered different alternatives, and, after much convincing on my part, settled on a mangonel design.

Our fatal mistake was using the rubber bands for torsion instead of the string. In the end, our catapult could throw the ball just 2 or so meters, while other teams managed 6 or even 8. On the final attempt the elastic bands broke, but otherwise it held together quite nicely. One of our team members later rewound it with string - and it worked considerably better then, easily being able to beat the other teams. However, it was too late by then. As our scale also failed (as we had bad luck with candy, which was actually of different weight than it should have), we got the last place. Nonetheless, it was all quite fun.

For dinner we were served a three-course meal and three different types of wine along with it. I managed to get into a rather heated discussion about what caused the financial crisis and it seemed that the other guy was a bit too drunk to notice I knew nothing about the subject.. It was fun. After dinner ended, I just went back home, meditate, practiced playing my Bass, read a bit and then went to bed. I was the first in my hut to do so. I presume the others were at the bar which was supposedly near the artificial ski slope. However, I had no idea where it would be and, to be honest, much preferred being alone as I had a long day behind me...

One thing that caught my attention was the fact that most people at the retreat (including the administrative staff) spoke native level English. When I asked Ivan about it, he blamed TV and movies, which they do not dub in Denmark. Nonetheless, their english is, on average, much better than it is on average in estonia. Essentially, Denmark is an english speaking country - much more than India is, for instance.

The second day started with a talk about administrative affairs, given by the dean of the department. There was then a session on how to go abroad where two people shared their experiences.. and also a session on how to do research, with four lecturers all discussing their views. I sat in the back row and, to enhance my hippie appearance, put my legs on the table. As before, no-one seemed to mind.

Then there was lunch and free time after that yet again. This time I asked one guy (who looked remarkably like one of my acquaintances, A.) whether he would like to play ping-pong. He did, and turned out to be roughly on my level doing some things better and others worse than me.. so we had fun.

The last session was about PhD supervision, where we were again in groups and had to discuss three questions about the student-supervisor relationships - such as whether the supervisor should keep constant watch on the PhD students or not and whether he should try to help with personal problems that are not directly related to research. The discussions were somewhat stale, mainly because the answer seemed to be "It depends" for all thee questions.

Then the retreat ended. We again got on the bus and drove back to Aarhus. In there, I was given a quick tour of the relevant part of the CS building - being shown, where the coffe room is, where the Crypto team is situated and where the administrative staff are. I was then handed directions on how to get to my dormitory. So - I went to the store, bought bus tickets (yes, even store clerks speak seemingly fluent english), walked to the bus station, got on the bus and off it again, walked to the dormitory... and was stomped because the doors seemed to be closed and it could well have been past closing time... however, I saw two students who were about to enter and asked them where the office was... so they took me there.. I recieved my key, settled my baggage down in my room, asked for directions to the nearest grocery store and set off to get some food.

Well - food I did get. Pasta, noodles, spaghetti, rice, pepper, teryaki sauce, bread, jam, cheese, milk, oil, salt, sugar, frozen vegetables, tea and coffe.. costing me around 400 DKK - but most of these things will last me for quite some time, so its ok.

I then got back and proceeded to the kitchen, where I met my first neighbours - two polish exchange students. As I proceeded to prepare food, I also got acquainted with an Egyptian, two Chinese and a finnish CS PhD student called Pirjo who was in Human Computer Interaction group but could not come to the BRICS retreat. As I again had made a bit too much food (rice with eggs and vegetables), I shared it with her - and it turned out she is also a vegetarian (as she initially thought the egg I used was some type of meat). I also asked one of the chinese students whether he would be willing to teach me how to cook chinese and he said he would. However, today he had a meat dish so that would have to wait.

After dinner, I got back to my room, played my Bass and then proceeded to write this blog entry. I think I will now head to bed, as I promised Ivan to try to be at his office door at around 10 a clock.